Is Christianity A Success?byAnnie Besant

(a one-penny pamphlet published 1885)

"Take again, glancing over history, the fashion in which Christian
nations have ever dealt with savage tribes. Charlemagne Christianised
the Saxons with fire and sword, breaking them into the obedience of
the Church. The Spaniards Christianized the Peruvians in similar fashion,
turning the happy flowery land of the Sun into a slave-filled shambles.
The English have Christianised Indians and Africans, Maories and Australians,
in good old historic manner by murder and fraud and theft. Look where
we will at the treatment experienced by the savage at Christian hands,
and we find ever the same old story--cruelty that sickens, treachery
that disgusts, brutality that appals.

"Christianity is the nursing mother of social evil, for it winks
at all oppression by the wealthy, and condones every crime in the believer.

"The new creed which is arising in the place of Christianity
gains a hearing very largely because of the failure of the religion
which it is seeking to destroy. Instead of meeting poverty with a benediction,
it regards it as a curse to be abolished by better social arrangements.
Disease to it is not the scourge of God, but the scourge of dirt and
ignorance, to be broken by cleanliness and knowledge. Sin to it is not
an object of divine wrath, but a subject for human skill, to be cured
by healthy environment."

Quoted from "Women Without Superstition"

Annie Laurie Gaylor
edited
"WOMEN WITHOUT SUPERSTITION"

The book jacket declares: "Women of
today owe an enormous debt to the freethinking founders and foremothers
of the women's movement, who dared question and confront the religious
status quo which demanded women's silence, subjection, servitude and
unquestioning obedience. It is thanks to the freethinking women who
challenged religious sway over civil laws and practices that women have
the rights they possess today."